1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements of a cartridge transporting device which transports a cartridge having a built-in magnetic tape or the like between each cell of a magazine and a storing/reproducing device such as a magnetic tape drive, and to improvements of a storage medium library device cartridge transporting method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Already-known as such device is a storage medium library device which includes: a storing/reproducing device for reading/writing data from/to a storage medium by mounting cartridges and magazines having a plurality of cells for housing the cartridges that include built-in storage mediums; and a cartridge transporting device for transporting the cartridges by reciprocating between each cell and the storing/reproducing device.
With this type of storage medium library device, it is common to fixedly place a plurality of magazines broadwise at specific intervals so as to transport the cartridge by moving the cartridge transporting device through utilizing the space between each of the magazines to pass and receive the cartridge.
Therefore, it is always necessary to provide a moving path between the neighboring magazines for allowing the cartridge transporting device to pass, so that two or more magazines cannot be provided very closely. As a result, the number of cartridges that can be housed inside the magazines becomes greatly limited or the storage medium library device itself becomes large-scaled.
As techniques for improving such shortcomings, there have already been proposed a magnetic-tape cartridge library device disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication 2003-196901 (Patent Document 1) and a magnetic-tape library device disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication 2004-178702 (Patent Document 2), for example.
The magnetic-tape cartridge library device depicted in Patent Document 1 has a control mechanism and a power supply arranged on the left and right sides of a tape deck, and a hand mechanism as a kind of a cartridge transporting device provided in the front side of the tape deck that is located in the center. At the same time, the magnetic tape cartridge library has lengthy magazines provided in parallel in both sides of the hand mechanism, i.e., on the front side of the control mechanism and the power supply, by utilizing the fact that the area occupied by the control mechanism and the power supply is smaller than the area occupied by the tape deck. The magnetic-tape cartridge library device is formed to be capable of removing the cartridge from the cell of the magazine that is at a position interfering with the left and right side faces of the tape deck through moving the magazines on both sides in longitudinal directions.
That is, this magnetic-tape cartridge library device is basically designed to achieve effective utilization of a dead space generated on the left and right sides of the tape deck. Thus, it naturally comes to have a structure where the hand mechanism is surrounded by the magazines on both sides and the tape deck, so that the hand mechanism itself cannot be moved because of such structure. Therefore, it is not possible with this magnetic-tape cartridge library device to be applied to a structure where magazines are provided over three rows or more.
Meanwhile, the magnetic-tape library device depicted in Patent Document 2 is structured to move a picker hand in three axial directions of X, Y, and Z, so that it is possible to make an access to the magazines from arbitrary directions such as the vertical direction, the lateral direction, and the back-to-front direction to remove the cartridge therefrom.
However, in order to avoid interferences between the moving mechanism of the picker hand and the moving mechanism of the magazines, it is necessary to provide those moving mechanisms on the top and bottom separately. Particularly, because the moving mechanism of the picker hand is disposed on the upper side of the magazine, the relative proportion of the space for the picker hand to move becomes large unless the magnetic-tape library device is formed in a large scale to some extent. This results in having such shortcoming that the space within the magnetic-tape library cannot be efficiently utilized.